There is no separation between the stories, no insurmountable barrier or enclosure between large and small apartments; all, from the least to the finest, from the outside as well as from the inside, have free access.
Spacious entrances around the exterior terminate in broad, well-lighted staircases open to the public; everybody can clamber up that pleases, and to mount these one must clamber; from top to bottom there is no other communication than that which they present.

There is no concealed and privileged passage, no private stairway or false door; glancing along the whole rectilinear, uniform flight, we behold the innumerable body of clerks, functionaries, supernumeraries, and postulants, an entire multitude, ranged tier beyond tier and attentive; nobody advances except at the word and in his turn .-- Nowhere in Europe are human lives so well regulated, within lines of demarcation so universal, so simple, and so satisfactory to the eye and to logic: the edifice in which Frenchmen are henceforth to move and act is regular from top to bottom, in its entirety as well as in its details, outside as well as inside; its stories, one above the other, are adjusted with exact symmetry; its juxtaposed masses form pendants and counterpoise; all its lines and forms, every dimension and proportion, all its props and buttresses combine, through their mutual dependencies, to compose a harmony and to maintain an equilibrium.

In this respect the structure is classic, belonging to the same family of productions which the same spirit, guided by the same method, had produced in Europe for the previous one hundred and fifty years.[2329] Its analogues, in the physical order of things, are the architectural productions of Mansard, Le Notre, and their successors, from the structures and gardens of Versailles down to and embracing the Madeleine and the Rue de Rivoli.

In the intellectual order, its analogues consist of the literary forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the superb oratorical prose and correct, eloquent poetry, especially epics and tragedies, including those still manufactured according to rule about the year 1810.

It corresponds to these and forms their pendant in the political and social order of things, because it emanates from the same deliberate purpose.